The Urgent Need to Create a Department of Urban Education

I took a little hiatus from writing. Quite frankly I’ve just been frustrated that there is SO MUCH to do with New Jersey’s urban schools, and all I see are politicians and education leaders patting themselves on the back for a tenure reform bill that, to me, simply illustrates how disengaged our leaders are from understanding the urgency to reform our schools.

I just read longitudinal graphs of NJ HSPA test scores, more specifically the proficiency gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged districts, and sad to say over the last ten years the gap has in some cases widened and in other cases stayed about the same. Clearly, whatever is being done in New Jersey right now is a complete an utter failure, and tenure reform is going to do little if anything to rectify the situation.

It is time for our State to literally declare a state of emergency in urban education, and commit the same relative time and resources to our schools and cities that we would if there were a natural disaster, epidemic, or other devastating event occurring.

Although some may insinuate from what I am about to say that I am somehow acknowledging failure, what it is instead is a realization that urban education is fundamentally different from suburban education, that the issues they face are fundamentally different, that their needs are fundamentally different, and that the solutions to their condition are fundamentally different from suburban schools.

What I am calling for, at least theoretically, is to create two distinct Departments of Education, one for urban schools and one for everyone else. I believe that urban schools should have a completely distinct set of Core Curriculum Content Standards and a completely distinct graduation exam. It is obvious from the nature of the current HSPA and statements from our education leaders and politicians that they see the CCCS and HSPA as designed not so much as a test to prepare students for life beyond high school but as a preparation test for college. Quite frankly, such tests already exist in the SAT and Achievement Tests. The DOE and our leaders have lost their sense of mission. For many if not most urban students, college is not “the next step” after high school, and judging from the drop-out rate from community colleges and for profit colleges, we are failing our urban students by  promoting college as their primary and essential path. I really am tired of hearing people say that college is now essential for all high school graduates. First of all, we are barely graduating half of our urban students, and secondly, the failure of our State to provide meaningful options in artisanship and trades is tragic.

What I would like is for all urban public high schools to be “emancipated” from state mandates and control and to in essence be turned into charter schools. We need to get rid of every bureaucratically minded administrator at the school level and replace them with visionary leaders that are free to design “independent” schools with a culture of learning that is challenging, safe, and student centered. Urban teachers should be guided by a contract that rewards exemplary performance based on metrics that provide teachers with enormous intellectual freedom to design new courses. Leaders of urban schools should be encouraged to develop comprehensive programs that integrate the business community, professionals, unions, and non-profit organizations into their fold. Incentives should be offered to parents to draw them into the schools and into their children’s lives.

Assume that no child is required to attend school, and then design a school that they would choose to go to each and every day when they get up in the morning. I think everyone needs to read the report by Civic Enterprises entitled: “The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Drop Outs.” This insightful report, which I’ll discuss in detail in my next posting, makes it clear that the reasons students drop out of school are complex AND easily addressed by schools that are free to design programs that connect to the young people in their community.

It is time for our leaders to wake up and get to work on fixing our urban schools. Money is important, but it is not the most critical factor. There has to be a realization in New Jersey that our urban schools and our suburban schools should not operate under the same rules. I am in no way saying that the standards in our urban schools should be lessened, only that they should be different. I hope I’m not the only that sees this; it is time for someone in our government or at the NJEA to admit to this reality and call for the kind of radical reform that is needed. There is no more urgent matter facing our State.

Scrap the HSPA and CCCS

Identifying factors that contribute to the horrible, and what I believe to be immoral inequities in our public education system can be exhausting. Blame can be spread around, from the culture of the schools to the quality of instruction to the guidance of parents to the quality of life in the communities to the policies of our political and educational leaders. Let’s not forget to include the business and non-profit communities as well. No one can truly escape scrutiny. The one factor I would like to address today is the role of the State, in particular the High School Proficiency Assessment and the Core Content Curriculum Standards.

To begin with, I think we need to acknowledge that there are actually two distinct types of school systems in the State: the urban and the suburban (we could add rural schools to the mix as well). I would argue that the difference between these type of districts is so profound, the performance chasm so great, that we literally need to have two distinct HSPAs. Personally, I think the HSPA is a fraud, a test completely detached from reality, and that we should take the opportunity to device a new assessment for graduation, using the urban schools as the “testing ground.”

Let’s first think about the rationale for the HSPA, which also asks us to question the rationale for high school. Has high school come to be seen as preparation for college, or preparation for life in a democratic, free market society? There is a difference. Are we testing what kids learned in high school, or are we testing what they should know in preparation for college. They are NOT the same thing.

Given that the HSPA does not test in areas other than math and language arts, it seems fair to conclude that the test is not designed to assess what kids should have been taught in high school; there is too much left out. My sense, both from experience as a teacher and as an observer of debate in academia and in the political arena, is that the test is geared towards college. But we already have the SAT and a host of achievement tests that college bound kids take in preparation for college. Given that a large percentage of students, especially those in the inner city, do not go on to college, it is important to see the HSPA solely as a test of the knowledge and skills acquired in high school. More to the point, the HSPA should assess how well prepared our high school graduates are for participation in American society. This would include an understanding of politics, economics, law, health and nutrition, culture, the environment, basic math, and financial literacy.

Unfortunately, the Core Content Curriculum Standards are so far off the mark in this respect as to be completely irrelevant. Let’s face it, the CCCS are written by smart people, academics in their particular field, and as such they are going to see much of their field as important to know. But these smart people need to think like the “average” person, the guy who may grow up to be a laborer, or a salesman, or a retail manager, not necessarily the guy that is going to college and perhaps graduate school. If a teacher actually teach all that they were required to teach under the CCCS, I would argue that most of what they taught was not learned. The science of learning simply does not comport with the enormous quantity of information required to be taught. It may be taught, but it is not learned, and it certainly is not remembered years after graduation.

Most adults forget most of what they learned in high school unless it is directly tied to their life and career choice, so it is important to at least try to limit requirements to those things that students will actually use in adult life.

 Given this, New Jersey’s CCCS should be very narrowly tailored, limited to those aforementioned topics. If our teachers, in collaboration with parents, do an effective job at creating perspicacious, intellectually curious students, then they will be equipped to pursue on their own any information they may want to explore in more detail. That detail should not be built into the CCCS.

Right now there is a movement for a national core curriculum, which New Jersey seems poised to adopt. That core curriculum is skill based rather than content based, and I definitely believe that we need to find a way to integrate that skill based core curriculum into our high school assessment. At the same time, we need to scrap and completely rewrite our core content standards and then redesign the HSPA to cover the national skills standards and content that draws from a broad segment of high school instruction, not just math and language arts.

Now let me get back to the inner city schools. Inner city students are failing to meet even minimal levels of competency in shockingly high numbers. If this were a discrimination case I would argue that the test is “guilty” of disparate treatment. There is no way that in the near future our inner city students will ever demonstrate the progress needed to make differences between urban and suburban schools indiscernible, and if you think about it shouldn’t that be the case?

I believe that we need to rethink the way we approach education in the State, and device a completely distinct “action plan” for our urban schools that includes a new core curriculum and a new HSPA. New Jersey is a “tale of two cities,” in the sense that the performance of these schools is nowhere near the performance of suburban schools. Because they are so different, they must be approached differently, and yes that may mean a different curriculum and a different HSPA. Nowhere am I arguing that it should be “easier,” just that it should be different.

Once we accept the reality that these differences exist, that these differences necessitate a different approach, and that the current CCCS and HSPA are inappropriate for our urban schools, we can move forward to create a culture of learning that prepares urban students for life beyond high school, regardless of whether they choose to enter the workforce, enroll in a trade school, go to college, or enter the military. Ironically, our educational leaders fail to see that urban school students actually have more choices than suburban students, who are pretty much told by their parents that they are going to college. Our suburban schools are “college prep factories,” or inner city schools are not. The graduation test should reflect that variety of directions by focusing on the one commonality shared by these students; they will need to understand our culture, participate in the political process, be civic minded, healthy, aware of their environment, and possess the legal, economic, and financial literacy needed to function independently as citizens. If the HSPA does not address this reality, then it fails to perform as a valid assessment and will continue to be the fraud that it is today.

The Solutions Noone Wants to Discuss

Almost everything I read in the area of education reform seems directed at efforts to reform the schools themselves. The “solutions” invariably focus on ways to improve the performance of teachers. I certainly don’t disparage these efforts, as teachers in the inner city are often "cheated" out of having quality administrators or appropriate professional development to improve their performance. Given that empirical data indicate most of our teachers have come from the lowest quartiles of college graduates, and that the best of these graduates seem to gravitate to our better suburban districts, anything that can be done- short of a complete turnover of a school’s faculty and administration- would be a step in the right direction.

The problem, however, is that even though exemplary teachers can provide some appreciable improvement in student performance, they can only do so much. The real solution to student performance has to do with the students themselves; what we need is a complete transformation of the demographics in the inner city with the goal of increasing the diversity- cultural, socioeconomic, and racial- of families in our urban areas.

To me the “beginning of the end” in urban education began in the late 1950’s with the development of our interstate system. A consequence of this massive public project was the flight of middle and upper class families out of the inner city to the safety and tranquility of the suburbs, which at that time was essentially a new addition to our nation’s landscape. This socioeconomic flight, first undertaken by whites but now including minorities, has devastated our cities. When you combine this flight with the appearance in our suburbs of new middle class citizens, what you have left in the city is a preponderance of working poor and poor that are essentially dependents on the State. One important fact about poverty among minorities is that it is highly concentrated, much less diffuse than with whites.

This flight to the suburbs has been compounded by another enormous societal shift, first identified by Senator Daniel Moynihan in the late 1960’s, in the composition of families in America. The stigma attached to single parent families has all but disappeared in the US, and now the percent of “non-traditional” households now outnumbers the so-called traditional nuclear family. There is no doubt in my mind- and I will gather the empirical evidence- that these two shifts have helped decimate the inner city schools.

There are a plethora of ancillary and tangential issues that exist as a result of these shifts, including those dealing with home ownership, the presence of neighborhood role models, and the at-home support given to children living in the inner city. Programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone seem to acknowledge and affirm these problems.

I will touch on these issues in more details in subsequent posts, but there can be no doubt that unless we treat the situation in the inner city as no less than a domestic threat to our national security, we will never be able to make the inroads we need to change the outcomes produced by our schools. I’m not suggesting that we “get rid” of the students attending our schools and the families that rely on these schools, but I am suggesting that we need to add to the population, essentially “flipping” suburban flight on its head. It is only then that we will have the type of change that will best assure that our youngest citizens will have true opportunities to improve their lives.

Dangers in the New Teacher Evaluation System

The recent vote in the legislature to introduce a new teacher evaluation system is long overdue. The current system and metrics have failed to have any noticeable impact on teacher performance and was an inadequate system for identifying subpar teachers and acknowledging exemplary work. Hopefully the new metrics will serve as a precursor to creation of a new system of remuneration based on performance rather than years of service. However, before our political and education leaders start patting themselves on the back over this new law, there is one great danger and one potential unintended consequence of the legislation that must be considered.

I am extremely skeptical and concerned about the power given to principals in this new evaluation system. Schools, like most other workplaces I suspect, are full of drama, and principals, being human (at least we assume so) are just as prone as others to be driven by emotion and prone to making decisions based on personality and their own perception of what makes a good teacher, even though my experience and conversations with other teachers confirms my belief that many principals were not particularly good teachers, hence their interest to go into administration. With tenure now tethered to the outcome of performance reviews that were once perfunctory but now extremely consequential, the lack of any real countervailing power to that of principals should raise a red flag to any outspoken, unconventional, or “different” teacher that does not “fit the mold” in the eyes of the principal.

This leads me to a second concern, which is the risk aversive nature of the new evaluation system. I am extremely concerned that the new system will discourage innovation and risk taking on the part of teachers, especially in the inner city where such behaviors are needed but where the pressure on principals to “catch” poor teachers is extremely high. What if the attempt at “trying something new” doesn’t have the payoff the teacher intended? He or she will certainly learn from the experience, but why take the risk of getting a bad evaluation, which will trigger even greater scrutiny and place the teacher on a path to tenure revocation? Without some affirmation from principals that innovation and risk taking are to be encouraged and supported, I suspect that most teachers will refrain from such actions.

It is critical that principals set clear expectations for the faculty, and that it be made clear those teachers will not be punished for trying new things- as long as they have valid educational objectives- in the classroom. I would also hope that principals, will, on their own initiative, will create a framework for evaluation at their school which voluntarily sets up a “check” on their evaluations so that teachers are not intimidated and otherwise discouraged from taking risks, being outspoken, or just “being themselves” because it doesn’t comport to what the principal sees as being the “proper kind” of teacher.

It’s great that we are moving forward in the area of evaluation and accountability, but let’s not be too sanguine. There is great potential for missteps.

Welcome to the SEEL Academy

It’s time for me to put up or shut! I have rather harsh on our State’s education system. Whether it be the overall inequity, the HSPA, the core curriculum, teachers, or administrators, no one nor nothing has escaped my wrath J Well in my latest blog on the horrific decision to close Emily Fisher Charter School I alluded to a school of my own design. It’s time for me to introduce you to the S.E.EL. Academy; the acronym stands for School for Entrepreneurial Education and Leadership. In the next few weeks I will intermittently detail some aspect for my school, and if you have a few hundred grand laying around, let’s talk!

Today I want to share my thoughts on the Academy’s academic program. At the SEEL Academy there are no specific course requirements, though the school and each student must complete the proscribed number of years of a particular discipline (Science, Math, Phys Ed…). It will be up to each student, in concert with their guidance counselor and teacher/adviser, to make sure that they are taking classes that will meet college expectations. For those students not interested in college, they are free to take any classes they want within each department.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  In terms of hiring, what kind of teachers will staff the SEEL Academy? Since the HSPA does not test students in areas other than Math and Language Arts, I’m really not that concerned about teachers meeting the plethora of onerous Cumulative Progress Indicators delineated in the Core Curriculum Content Standards. If the State does in fact begin to introduce subject area tests, it will be up to the teachers in each department to make sure that SEEL’s curriculum tangentially aligns with the State’s CCCS.

In the formative stages of the Academy’s academic program, focus groups will be set up for each department’s staff- though other teachers are free to join in- to brainstorm a list of the content (and skills) that they believe each student MUST know as a prerequisite for graduation. Though this work will include skills, the foundation for the Academy’s skills requirement will be the Core Curriculum being pushed today in the national debate.

So who will be teaching? The first hiring requirement is that the prospective teacher must have a degree in discipline other than education, so yes in fact most if not all teachers will have a “specialized degree.” Education courses could be taken as part of a minor or taken for enrichment once they begin teaching. I will deal with professional development and support in a later blog. Our Science Department will have a Biology teacher, a Physics teacher, and a Chemistry teacher. There may be an engineer, an astronomer, a botanist, a geologist, an environmentalist, or most any other type of subject specialist. The Social Studies Department may include an historian, an economist, a pre-law student, a political scientist, or maybe a sociologist. The Physical Education and Health Department may include a nurse, a physical therapist, or a kinesiologist.  You get the picture.

These teachers will be free to design their own semester courses. It is my contention that by hiring individuals with knowledge and passion in a particular area of study and expertise, that the resulting courses will “be” an expression of that knowledge and passion, which are two of the 5 metrics we use to develop and evaluate effective teachers. With proper clinical supervision, these classes will be lively, rigorous forums for true learning.

A smart teacher, one that is determined to engage his or her audience, will design the course in such a way that student interests are also integrated into the curriculum, whether through the required coursework or through activities and assessments that empower students to pursue these personal interests.

I may be overly optimistic about the impact that this intellectual freedom will have on student achievement, but one thing I do know is that whatever is being done today is not working in our urban schools.  Intellectual freedom, increased accountability and empowerment are the hallmarks of curriculum development at the SEEL Academy. We will draw on the knowledge and passion of our educators, and hopefully we will see our students demonstrating the same.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Dormtories for Urban Public Schools

Even in schools that were to adopt a Broken Windows approach to discipline (see the previous posting), a majority of kids in these urban schools will return home to neighborhoods that suffer from the same lack of commitment to stemming street level crime. About a decade ago Professor Elijah Anderson, who at the time was at Penn but now resides at Yale, wrote a poignant essay in the Atlantic Magazine titled “Code of the Streets,” where he described and explored the difficulties encountered by “regular folk” that reside in these communities but are overwhelmed by an ethic, the Code of the Streets, that is based on “respect” and ultimately leads to an acceptance of violence, blood feuds, and a general value system  in direct conflict with the middle class values- call it the Protestant Work Ethic if you want- that regular folk try to impart on their kids. There are also cases where children of parents who “live” the street code aspire to better themselves and adopt a middle class ethic. In the absence of strong role models and supportive parents, these kids are resigned to fighting a struggle they are ill equipped to win.

 There must be a way to help these kids, and given the crisis in urban education, we must be open to all ideas, even those that at first glance might seem crazy. I have such an idea: establish dormitories for select students to live in while they attend school. I envision this at first for high school age students, as they are the group most able to advocate for themselves and assist in caring for their needs. These dormitories would be staffed by teachers, college students aspiring for a career in education, and other professionals in some way connected to the school, such as members of a child study team. These dormitories would operate under strict rules, be secure, and have a variety of resources to enhance a student’s learning experience, including their health. There would obviously have to be extensive oversight to these facilities as well.  

There is no time to waste addressing the tragedy of urban education. Unfortunately, many of the solutions being proffered today lack creativity, ingenuity, and yes, risk. If you believe as I do that an entrepreneurial mindset is needed in the classroom and in the schools, then it follows that any attendant solution to education should embody that same mindset. Dormitories for public school students is such an idea, and I believe it deserves consideration.

Broken Windows / Broken Schools

In the 1980’s Professor James Q. Wilson introduced the “Broken Windows” theory of crime. He postulated that serious crime tends to flourish in neighborhoods that neglect to deal with the smaller, annoying, misdemeanor type offenses such as criminal mischief, public urination and drunkenness, graffiti, and muggings to name but a few, but in those neighborhoods that deal aggressively with the “broken windows,” relative peace and civility will reign.

Simply put, I believe that this theory should be applied to the schools in these neighborhoods at the “tipping point,” and that by doing so it will engender an environment of civility that will foster a climate where a culture of learning can flourish. From what I have been able to ascertain through conversations with high school students, urban schools are focused on reducing violent crime but neglectful of dealing with what might be described as nuisance behavior, disruptive to the school community but so common as to be accepted.

I would suggest that it is time for administrators to start dealing aggressively with “broken windows” behavior, whether it be in the classroom, the hallways, the rest rooms, cafeteria, or any other part of the campus.

Students often say that a lack of security and a preoccupation with violence, bullying, and intimidation makes it difficult to concentrate on academics. It’s a contention I’d find hard to dispute. I think that it is time for administrators in our inner city schools to learn and implement Broken Windows precepts in their buildings. Rather than live by the credo “don’t sweat the small stuff,” it is time to make those guilty of the small stuff sweat.